6 January, 2014

Thats a lot of snow for sure.  Here this past week has just been sun,sun, sun, and it did rain a little bit, but then went back to having more and more sun. Thats a crazy amount of snow though!  How is everything going right now? Is it all cleaned up or is it still everywhere?

  This week has been pretty normal, except for New Years.  New Years eve was Tuesday, so spent the earlier part of the day trying to visit with all of our investigators before everything went crazy. Mostly just spent some of our time visiting with members. Same story as Christmas. Get to a house, say hello, eat some of their food (thats one thing in Brazil thats really difficult, everybody tries to feed you and its really hard to say now, I think I´m actually starting to put on weight now), and then take off running trying to get to the next house. We weren´t able to stay out till 10:30pm though this time, so went back to the house and played Monopoly.  You could definetely tell when it was Midnight though. About 2-3 minutes beforehand this roar of fireworks started, just this never ending stream of fireworks into the air. Escalated until Midnight and held steady for about 5 minutes, then started to taper off.  Crazy. The next day the entire city was dead. Nobody was in the  streets, I think that the principal that we go to, out of the 30-40 shops there, 1 was open.  For the first time ever, we could see from one end of the principal to the other. That day wasn´t really productive because everything was shut down b/c everybody was resting.  Thursday and Friday, Elder Lima, one of my Zone Leaders was here, so I got to work with him for a day and that was really cool. Saturday, was normal, trying to get baptismal interviews done for everybody that needed one. Sunday was Fast Sunday, didn´t get a chance to bear my testimony, but I played piano for sacrament meeting again this week which was pretty cool. I think I´m doing it every week now. Sunday night was kinda of cool and really kind of a miracle. The mission goal is that you have at least one baptism a week. We hadn´t one b/c all of our investigators either weren´t ready or busy.  We were walking around Sunday night trying to see if any of them still wanted to be baptized, but none of them did.  We ran into one of our recent converts with his girlfriend about 6:50ish and started talking. Our convert mentioned that he actually wanted to have his girlfriend baptized as well.  We immediately turned to her and started to question her. Turns out she had already taken the discussions from other missionaries before and had a desire to be baptized, so we said, Why not right now? Headed off to the chapel with her, she got interviewed, and held a quick baptismal service after that and she was baptized.  Was definitely a miracle.  

  This next week is the last week in the transfer and pretty nervous for the upcoming transfers.  I don´t know if I want to stay in my area or get transferred, but we´ll find out. Sorry this isn´t longer but don´t have much time this week. Have a great week everybody!

Love 

Ben/ElderBattraw

P.S I plan on buying my camera tomorrow. Already picked it out and everything, just need to pick up and pay.probably about the equivalent of 200 dollars b/c everything here is a lot more expensive, but I promise to send more pictures!